There was a moralistic, unnecessary, and wholly unscientific new restriction enacted on funding for the National Institute of Health as part of the appropriations bill passed in January. The new legislative mandate forces researchers who rely on government funding to place anti-pornography filters on their computer networks. There are serious potential consequences, such as filters overblocking sites that are anatomical rather than pornographic in nature as well as lost funding for scientific research that may legitimately need to access pornographic sites. The end result? Members of Congress, rather than the scientific community, imposing restrictions on what researchers should be investigating.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) released its annual “Enemies of the Internet” index this week—a ranking first launched in 2006intended to track countries that repress online speech, intimidate and arrest bloggers, and conduct surveillance of their citizens.Some countries have been mainstays on the annual index, while others have been able to work their way off the list.Two countries particularly deserving of praise in this area are Tunisia and Myanmar (Burma), both of which have stopped censoring the Internet in recent years and are headed in the right direction toward Internet freedom.

For the last month, Venezuela has been caught up in widespread protests against its government. The Maduro administration has responded by cracking down on what it claims as being foreign interference online. As that social unrest has escalated, the state's censorship has widened: from the removal of television stations from cable networks, to the targeted blocking of social networking services, and the announcement of new government powers to censor and monitor online. Last night, EFF received reports from Venezuelans of the shutdown of the state Internet provider in San Cristóbal, a regional capital in the west of the country.

A link is just a link...except when it isn’t. In one ongoing case in Morocco, the act of linking to a news article that linked to a YouTube video that was posted by a terrorist group has landed a prominent editor in jail, charged with “material assistance” to a terrorist group, “defending terrorism,” and “inciting the execution of terrorist acts.”

If it sounds Kafkaesque, that’s because it is. Arrested on September 17, Ali Anouzla, the Moroccan editor of the online-only publication Lakome, is currently being held in pre-trial detention.